Shut All Nuclear Power Says Former NRC Chair

Submitted by IWB, on September 25th, 2013

Spent reactor fuel, containing roughly 85 times more long-lived radioactivity than released at Chernobyl, still sits in pools vulnerable to earthquakes. And what of our own nuclear power plants? The largest storage pools in the country are located in a heavily populated area at a reactor complex, Shearon Harris, just outside Raleigh, NC transported from other reactors by rail through high population centers on the East Coast. A report from scientists at MIT and Princeton warned that…

“Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly and catch fire,” wrote Bob Alvarez, a former advisor to the Department of Energy and co-author of the report. “The fire could well spread to older fuel. The long-term land contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than Chernobyl.”